Oct 4- when the alarm clock went off

... in my luggage on arrival at the Delhi airport, I should have listened…it was a wake-up call.

Midnight, the streets empty, surreal...this is Delhi? Turns out, we had arrived in the wake of the opening of the Commonwealth Games, all businesses had been closed all day, 40,000 street people had been evacuated by train to no-one knew where. Everything looked in-between…either curiously unfinished or falling apart. 

The posh Park Hotel: right next door to the headquarters of the Commonwealth Games, police, barriers, security checks everywhere. The room: very modern, glass walls on bathroom give an eerie blue glow. I think we need to sleep to deal with all of this. In the morning we find the blue glow is everywhere…

Oct 4 for real….a rather dramatic day as it turns out. I got TD (don’t ask) before lunch…would have liked a bit of an introduction to Indian public toilets before this: hole in the floor, bucket for flushing. Shorter pants would have been advisable, carrying toilet paper nice. ‘Twas not to be. No photos of this part of the day.

In the pm, after two hours of trying on silk surtees on the second floor of a delightful little shop with a rickety staircase, in an auto-rickshaw (think golf cart) in rush hour traffic, I discovered my wallet missing.

Calls to Visa to suspend…am getting good at this... had lost the card before in Paris, had it replaced by Vienna….only to get a call from the fabric store that it had been found. The recovery was quite dramatic…20 waiters watch in fascination as it is returned to me by a not very jolly police-officer…the whole thing a production, that involved, it seemed, a cast of thousands (okay, just 10 or 20). Why the fabric store phoned to say it had been found in the restaurant and was being held by police is still a mystery. My faith in the good in human nature remains unshaken. But I should have listened to my alarm clock.